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Basically, ICANN is saying, "It's not our job to suspend domain registrations; it's the registrar's job. We just coordinate registrars."

Okay, I think I sort of get it now.

FTFA:

E360 electronically submitted a proposed order to the court for its review which, if signed, would call for Tucows (Spamhaus' Registrar) and/or ICANN to suspend or place a client hold on www.spamhaus.org.

Even if ICANN were properly brought before the court in this matter, which ICANN has not been, ICANN cannot comply with any order re

Influence, yes. Legal rights, no. All they could do was plead their case and hope the Swedish authorities did what they wanted them to do. If the Swedish authorities would have just told them to bugger off, nothing would have happened.

I think the likely choices are either Tucows (as the registrar) or the Public Interest Registry [pir.org], who is the actual maintainance organization for the.org TLD.

I'm not sure how PIR is structured and how responsive they would be to a U.S. court order -- a lot of their board of directors seem to be European, although their mailing address is in Reston, VA, and I'm not sure where they're officially incorporated -- but Tucows is probably in a position where they have a lot to lose if they ignored it.

Still, can a registrar really "pull" a domain? It's the PIR that maintains the root DNS servers for the TLD, so if they decide to just not delete spamhaus's DNS entry, then the domain stays active. Tucows basically sends requests to the PIR to add new DNS records when someone registers a new domain, but they don't (at least, I don't think they do) actually operate the servers themselves. What is Tucows supposed to actually do?

It would be interesting if PIR just said "no" to the order, once it goes to them from Tucows, and refused to do it. There could be some very interesting precedent as a result of this: should a U.S. court have the authority to pull a domain belonging to a non-U.S. corporation or citizen? Should a German court be able to order a domain for a U.S. corporation or citizen pulled? How about a Saudi Arabian court?

Basically, ICANN says that they've not been ordered to act and suspend the spamhaus.org [spamhaus.org] domain, and even if they had they couldn't do it "because ICANN does not have either the ability or the authority to do so".

They also state that ICANN is not party in the lawsuit and is not involved in it.

They end their posting by stating that only spamhaus.org's registrar or the Internet Registry have the ability and authority to suspend an individual domain name.

They close their posting by stating that this comment was made in response of the community's interest (in the ICANN's position on the matter).

They end their posting by stating that only spamhaus.org's registrar or the Internet Registry have the ability and authority to suspend an individual domain name.

And in that regard, it would do no good, as Spamhaus could simply register another domain with a registrar in a different country using a TLD outside the normal.org structure (I believe they already have.co.uk) and that would be that. Given the number of potential TLDs, e360 could be in litigation forever even attempting to shut down every po

The reality is that if Spamhaus gets around the court order by switching domain to maintain the blocking, the judge would very likely then rule us in criminal contempt. We don't want a criminal record for the sake of fighting spam. We normally help fit the spammers with criminal records, not the other way round.

While it's technically true that they could get around it, legally, it's not a great idea.

No, they have spamhaus.org.uk. Simply visiting spamhaus.co.uk would make it very obvious that they're not related.

Yeah, I advocated switching to spamhaus.org.uk, but their RBL DNS zones still don't use.org.uk, and even so they would still have to get millions of consumers of the list to switch over. Yes, spamhaus could eventually continue operating with technical workarounds. And then e360 would get criminal contempt slapped on Linford, who would never be able t

ICANN says that #1. They haven't been properly brought before the court, therefor the court should not be issuing any orders that effect them. #2. They can not suspend Spamhaus, if ordered to do so, as they do not have the ability to do so. The only party that can do so would be Tucows, who registered Spamhaus.

The only party that can do so would be Tucows, who registered Spamhaus.

Actually I think the party that could actually do so would be the Public Interest Registry, who maintain the.org TLD. If Tucows wanted to pull the spamhaus.org domain, they'd basically just be submitting a request to PIR anyway, so it would seem like the most direct route if you wanted to go after the domain, would be to order the registry to do it.

That's where things really get dangerous in my mind. If the TLD organizations (there are

Spamhaus is not based in the USA, and has no offices in the USA, so therefore the court has no jurisdiction to sieze anything from them. It's even dubious that the judge has the right to sieze the domain name, as it's registered with another non-US company. ICANN is just saying "Don't bother slapping us with a subpoena because we can't do it anyway."

This has much further reaching implications than it may seem at first. First Spamhaus, then online gambling sites that are perfectly legal in other countries. After that will come torrent sites, crack sites or anyone who does anything that might be illegal in the USA but legal elsewhere.

According to a very interesting analysis of the case [securiteam.com] which was originally linked from another/. story on this case a couple of days ago, Spamhaus's problem is that they tacitly accepted the court's jurisdiction at the start, which makes it very difficult to claim otherwise now:

"Spamhaus may have waived personal jurisdiction as a defense early on in the case when they not only appeared, but then asked for the case to be removed from state court (where it was originally filed) and moved to federal district court (where it is today). Arguably, and this makes sense intuitively even if you don't understand the finer points of U.S. civil procedure, doing so inherently acknowledged the jurisdiction of the federal court."

The court has the authority to order whatever it likes. If the person/representative of the company so ordered fails to comply, then a warrant can be issued for their arrest. That applies no matter what country the subject of the order is in.However, that said, if the subject of the order is in a different country, they can choose to ignore the order on the assumption that their home country will not prosecute or extradite them. For something this trivial, there's almost no chance that they would do so.

And the result of that slippery slope, if there are enough successful lawsuits, is that hosting companies will start IP filtering for the web sites and services they host. Another service offering! Don't want to raise the ire of some US-based (or other litigious country-based) company? Just block incoming access attempts from that country's IPs. If you get sued and could counter-sue for damages (and win), go there and win and then take a vacation.

IANAL but it reads like they will not shut down the domain entry unless the owner asks (is forced by a court) to have it shut down, pretty much forceing anyone who wants to shut down the site to sue spamhaus IN THEIR OWN DAMN COUNTRY, not wherever the most usefull set of laws for their litigation may be.

IANAL but it reads like they will not shut down the domain entry unless the owner asks (is forced by a court) to have it shut down

No, what they say is:

The ICANN was not ordered anything (yet)

Even if they were ordered to shutdown a domain, they couldn't, it's the domain's registrar or the Internet Register's job to do this, and only them have the ability and authority to terminate a domain name.

10 Second History
Spamhaus listed E360 as spammers
E360 sued Spamhaus in an Illinois court, saying that they weren't spammers.
Spamhaus said that an Illinois court has no jurisdiction and didn't show up.
E360 won a default judgement because Spamhaus didn't show up.
Spamhaus still said the court had no authority and ignored the judgement.
E360 filed for an injunction, asking the court to order either ICANN or the domain registrar to block the Spamhaus domain because Spamhaus ignored the judgement.

12 Second HistorySpamhaus listed E360 as spammersE360 sued Spamhaus in an Illinois court, saying that they weren't spammers.Spamhaus said Illinois court has no jurisdiction, take it to Federal courts.E360 sued Spamhaus in a Federal court, saying that they weren't spammers.Spamhaus doesn't show up to Federal court, despite having accepted their jurisdiction.E360 won a default judgement because Spamhaus didn't show up.Spamhaus still said the court had no authority and ignored the judgement.E360 filed for an injunction, asking the court to order either ICANN or the domain registrar to block the Spamhaus domain because Spamhaus ignored the judgement.

OK, in "modern english" from my amateur interpretation of the article (feel free to correct me)

e360 has joined the chatspamhaus has joined the chate360: omg we aren't spammers so we sue u becos u think we are!spamhaus:...court has joined the chatcourt: spamhaus won't reply, so default judgement of $12 million in litigation costs for themcourt: oh, and u must remove e360 from ur spammer list now!!court: and btw, tell u did wrong on ur website...icann has joined the chaticann: wtf! whats e360 claims based on anyway??e360: omg take down every spamhaus domain until they comply with court's order! FFStucows has joined the chat (= Spamhaus.org domain registrar)tucows: ??? wtf is all the ruckus about!e360: just sign the papers to bring down the assholes u idiot** start of these news **icann: i dunno... but WE cant do shit.. we lack teh authority..icann: spamhaus never wrote a contarct with us... its up to tucows i guessicann: hell we werent even brought to court properly by 360

Will be interesting to see how it unfolds... If I understand things right, TUCOWS has not responded.

They actually state that "no order has been issued in this matter requiring any action by ICANN". In a word, they were NOT ordered to take down spamhaus.org, they note that "a Proposed Order referencing ICANN has been submitted to the court" (which would mean that the proposed order hasn't been accepted by the court yet)

f the registrar was GoDaddy or someone high profile like that, we'd probably be alright

We'd "be alright" with GoDaddy only because they take an even more self-righteous view of spam than most of the RBL operators, and have shown a propensity to deal harshly with people that they *think* might be spammers based on the thinnest of evidence.

ICANN is the organization responsible for all domain registration. They were ordered to remove spamhous.org 's registration, and as the article says, have refused. The registrar that sponsors their domain, Tucows Inc., could still be ordered to cut their registration -- if that happens, watch your inbox for deluges of spam. If the registrar was GoDaddy or someone high profile like that, we'd probably be alright.... Tucows... we're screwed.

Which while annoying briefly, might be a Good Thing(tm). Face it, those who use services like Spamhaus probably don't realize *how much* spam there is. If your government official gets 1 spam in 20, well, they thing "just hit delete" works fine if their total spam load is 1,000 emails a day (50 spams get through). If, on the other hand, they suddenly are hit with the full brunt of it, there may be changes. Imagine Grandma who gets 5 or 6 spams a week after her ISP's filters (which probably are quite effective). And then suddenly getting 600 a day. It may open up the eyes of those who don't believe it to be a problem because they're sitting behind a wall protecting them. It's just we've all been sitting "behind the wall" to see true increases. When the amount of mail that makes it past the filters doubles, total traffic may have increased 10 times or more.

This might encourage development of a new email infrastructure that gets rapidly adopted by the Internet, suddenly faced with the realities of how much spam there really is in the world.

I for one, would love to see the end of poorly-configured MTAs who send me bounce emails that are improperly formatted. Of all things an MTA should do, is to generate proper emails! Otherwise they're contributing to the spam problem (I've got hundreds all addressed as "Mailer Daemon " and even more from antivirus/antispam systems, and nevermind whitelist systems. They all seem to contribute to the spam problem by generating even more email in response to email.)

This might encourage development of a new email infrastructure that gets rapidly adopted by the Internet, suddenly faced with the realities of how much spam there really is in the world.

No, all it will mean is that no-one on a consumer internet connection will ever be able to run a MTA (for whatever reason) ever again, even if they have a legitimate reason to (e.g. genuine list server). The ISPs will just say, 'You should use our mail relay,' despite the fact that it's craply configured and slow, and the

s/consumer internet connection/internet connection with a dynamic IP address/There. That should fix your comment. Note that IMHO, this should happen ANYWAY. Dynamic addresses sending email direct to port 25 should be blocked. The problem is that there is no accountability with dynamic addresses. Way back when, when the internet was a kinder, more gentle place, this wasn't a problem. It is now, and action needs to be taken even though it causes some hardship for some people. This is why we have the MSA port

Actually, I think that change would be a Good Thing.99.9% of what you call "consumer internet connections" have NO reason to run an MTA ever. If you do have a reason for running an MTA or other server-type service -- get a host! I use IX WebHosting -- nice plans starting at $4/month (IMAP and POP email, listserves, generous disk space and bandwidth, scripting support). I'm hosting my soon-to-launch business over there using their Unlimited Pro plan. Their $6.45/mo plan (mid-tier) includes MySQL and Post

One of the beautiful things about the Internet is that anyone can setup the services they want. Some are abusive, most are not. Your proposal says that individuals have no reason to do what they want to do. The only way to go is to trust corporate-supplied services. That is not the Internet I signed up to.

Probably not. It really depends on what kind of leverage the Federal court has over Canadian companies that have branches that trade in the US concerning transactions that aren't made involving the US business. I'm not convinced it has any.

As others have pointed out, Tucows is headquartered in Canada and they do have physical offices in the US. IANAL but that leads me to believe they might fall under Federal court jurisdiction. Anyone care to confirm or deny?

The Spamhaus Project is a largely volunteer effort founded by Steve Linford in 1998 that aims to track e-mail spammers and spam-related activity. It is named for the anti-spam jargon term coined by Linford, spamhaus, a pseudo-German expression for an ISP or other firm which spams or willingly provides service to spammers.

Spamhaus is responsible for the two most widely-used DNS-based Blackhole List (DNSBLs, also known as Real-time Blackhole List or RBL) in the anti-spam arena -- the Spamhaus Block List (SBL) and the Exploits Block List (XBL). Many internet service providers and other Internet sites use these free services to reduce the amount of spam they take on. The SBL and XBL collectively protect almost 500 million e-mail users, according to Spamhaus' web page (April 2006).

Being incorporated in Canada does not exempt them from Illinois law. That's like saying a Canadian citizen can't be prosecuted for crimes committed in Illinois.

You're oversimplifying. First, this is civil law, not criminal. Second, no crime was committed. Third, This is an Illinois court ordering a canadian company to suspend a service they contract to a UK organization. If the service is provided in the US, then the court might have the authority, but if the service is not, there is some serious question of jurisdiction here. You can't go ordering companies that do business both within and outside the US to take arbitrary actions outside the US in response to civil suits within the US.

You can't go ordering companies that do business both within and outside the US to take arbitrary actions outside the US in response to civil suits within the US.

Oh really? Are you an attorney who practices in the USA? Or just another Slashdotter who thinks that common sense is how the law works?

Other countries certainly think they can do this very thing. France thinks so. Maybe you don't remember the controversy over Ebay and Nazi items, but a French court ruled that Ebay, a US based business, had

Your arguement would work if TUCOWS comitted a crime in Illinois, at which point they could be extradited to the US to face charges. However, in this situation, TUCOWS would be under no obligation to comply with the demands of the US court, since Illinois law and juresdiction doesn't extend into Canada. That would be like allowing, say, Utah judges to demand that bars in Mexico stop serving booze from large containers, just because Utah has a law prohibiting that. Sorry, but it doesn't work that way.

Tucows will probably be a little more savvy in dealing with the complaint. Something along the lines of "We cannot comply with any order by this court because doing so would breach Canadian Contract law". Rather than Spamhaus's "We want to change the jurisdiction to the district court". "We do not accept the juriosdiction that we have just accepted".

spamhaus.org is registered by TUCOWS who are a Canadian company and thus not subject to Illinois law.

Well, they do run business in the US, so who knows how it would unfold; I'm not familiar with how much tucows cares about such things or if they'd just cave.

But, I can see it now....

e360: We need you to shut off this domaintucows: why?e360: Because they broke US lawtucows: But the owner of record is in the UK, so we can't do thate360: Yeah, but ICANN said they can't stop ittucows: So why should we?e36

So thought the CEOs of Internet betting companies registered and operating in UK. Until they got arrested.Similarly, while twocows is a Canadian corporation it most likely has US assets. If it ignores a US court order it can get nailed with an arrest on its assets. That is besides all trade treaties between US and Canada.

We should add a few letters to ICANN's name, therefore making it "ICANNOT." They literally supervise domain names and the IP space, however that's about it.

Now if Spamhaus registered the domain with GoDaddy, all 'e360' needs to do is say the site contains some severely questionable content and down the domain will go. GoDaddy has a good history with that...

Welcome to the life of a domain sales company. To avoid loosing safe harbor anybody that complains about a domain and includes the required verbage will take the site down and the countermand from the client will get it back up just as fast.

Where did Spamhaus show a lack of restraint? Correct me if I'm wrong, but Spamhaus has yet to show... well, anything in this case except disregard since they're not subject to US (much less Illinois) law. I know its a little more complicated than that, but I've seen nothing so far that has led me to believe that Spamhaus has done anything worthy of your description.

They lacked restraint when they showed up and asked it be moved to federal court from a state court. Doing that was an acknowledgement that federal courts had jurisdiction. They should have either not shown up at all, or showed up and said what you did.

Who do you think has more money for lawyers--an alleged spam outfit or a volunteer organization trying to perform what is essentially a public service?

A "public service" that they charge for, and that makes them little different than other companies offering blocking lists. You can _no longer_ download their list of blocked IP adresses unless you pay [openbsd.org]:

I'm sorry but that's utter rubbish. Spamhaus did no such thing to OpenBSD users. Any OpenBSD user can still query the Spamhaus blocklist. But Spamhaus has to charge for the rsync access to the list, in part for the cost of bandwidth, and in part to help ensure Spamhaus can continue as an organisation (for example, in paying for lawyers!).

Just because DeRaadt didn't want to re-code his app to use DNS instead of a local copy he put this FUD in his commit message.

Main idea IMHO is that in this way ICANN can say, nicely, NO to US court ruling. If they agreed they would actually gave up their independence and would become easy target for more attacks from US jurisdical system.

In this way they effectively explained themselves from executing court orders.

This is just a big hoopla for nothing. Basically, what happens is a spammer is just taking his wet-dreams for reality, nothing else, and he's been able to do so by misrepresenting facts to a judge that can only act on the facts. You know the old adage: "garbage in, garbage out".

The pity here is the media circus surrounding it which has made this the big mountain it isn't.

against people who throw away their junk mail without reading them. This adversely impacts the freedom of expression of the local pizzaria, the local grocery store, those carpet cleaning guys, the 12.99 oil change people, and the used car salesmen.

Also I want that judge to decalre the "do not call" list created by the US Govt illegal. If someone talks to you, you have to drop everything and listen. If someone sends you a piece of junk mail, you must read it.

In many ways, I am very happy about ICANN's decision. They are recognizing that the internet should not be controlled by politics or a single country/government.
If ICANN had blocked the domain, politicans would start to think that they controlled the internet (although some do think that way...)

ICANN's contention seems to be that even if ordered to remove the record, its not technically possible for them. Only the registrar (TUCOWS in this case) could remove the registration.

Is this accurate? Don't the glue records get published through ICANN, and couldn't they remove them?

Of course I am in favor of Spamhaus and against SPAMers...I'm just curious if this is a legal ploy on ICANN's part to help Spamhaus (which I would applaud), or if its just ICANN telling the truth (which I would also applaud...I'm easy to please).

Also, if true, couldn't Spamhaus just move their registrar from TUCOWS (Canada?) to a registrar in a less US court friendly country where any order to remove the registration could be ignored?

Tucows will be subject to the Federal court's jurisdiction, because they maintain business offices in the US (Starkville, MS, according to their website). So if Tucows is ordered to suspend/place on hold the domain registration, they'll be forced to comply.

If the contract between Spamhuis and Tucows was not done under US contract law (likelly, since Tucows is a Canadian company and Spamhuis is based in the UK), wouldn't Tucows be liable for breach of contract if the unilaterally terminated the contract since only Canadian courts can order a termination of the contract?Even if IANAL, it seems logical that a court in a country cannot order the termination of a contract done under another country's law - otherwise it would be a widespread scam to engage in a con

For a while now, the EU and other bodies have been grousing about ICANN being under the control of the US (Dept of Commerce, IIRC). I wonder if this stance *against* a US court will somewhat mollify those objections? ICANN's hardly a US puppydog if it distances itself from the US court system...right? Maybe?

I realize they aren't acting in defiance of a court order (they haven't even been contacted by the court yet, if I understand the press release), but at least they're toeing the "We're independent and neutral" line.

I say that the server location is where courts or governments should have jurisdiction.The problem is, most people/courts/governments are of the opinion that the server is somehow projecting out to the clients location.

Lets reverse that, and look at it as the client visiting the server. Your web client establishes a session on a foreign server, the server doesn't just randomly broadcast out data to the Internet in general. You have to take the initiative and GET the data.

Here's an idea if Spamhaus ends up deciding to comply with removing e360 from their spammer list.

Create a "People Who Sued Us" list. Make this list functionally similar to the normal ROSKO list, allowing IT admins to choose to use the PWSU list for e-mail filtering purposes. Chances are that anyone on the PWSU list is a known spammer, since only a known spammer would have to resort to shady legal practices to get removed from ROSKO. However, the PWSU list is based only on the easily provable fact of someone suing Spamhaus, meaning that nobody on that list could complain that they were being treated unjustly.

Many blocklists do make a point of advertising (probably on usenet - NANAE) the companies that are harassing them legally. Trust me, e360 insight or whoever t.f. is behind this current harassment will be remembered by the other blocklist operators (myself included). They may solve their spamhaus problem, but they will end up with new ones

If someone small creates this list, they might still be subject to costly legal harrasment. If some big news organization reports on these types of lawsuits by spammers, and just happens to maintain a history list, any legal action against them could probably be handled on the level of swatting flies by their legal department. News organizations have pretty strong precedents of First Amendment protection (and internal IT organizations which just happen to need to filte

Judges and the judicial system are set up so that court orders can be enforced. Usually against reluctant subjects, so dealing with whiners is not new to them.

Even in civil cases you can get a cop with a gun to go into a business and help you settle things up if the judge orders it. Unless anti-spam people think tucows is going to arm its US office and start shooting people, they are going to comply with this order.

Spamhaus had an easy out, make a special appearance and talk about jurisdiction. Or they could have moved it to federal and fought it on the merits, which would have likely established a positive precedent in the US for voluntary opt-in to these types of published opinion blacklists. Instead they try to game the legal system in the US. That's fine, but they are likely to lose their ability to work within the US by doing so.

There has been an arms race between spammers and admins, in many senses of the word. Spammers learned long ago that they will have an edge if they operate anonymously, either relaying through insecure relays in the old days, or more recently taking control of insecure PCs and servers and operating a fleet of zombie nodes. Their origin is masked. Or they might purchase services through dirty middlemen who then purchase services through dirty ISPs. Either way, spammers try to hide.

But the admins who fight spam often do not hide, usually because they are part of a reputable organization and are well respected by the community, and proud of their work. Also, the way blacklist technology is used (RBL, DNSBL) makes it difficult to conceal who you are. Unfortunately this makes organizations like Spamhaus vulnerable to DoS attacks, harassment, and frivolous lawsuits (remember that spammers call themselves 'internet marketers' and pretend they are legit businessmen). Other organizations like SPEWS are somewhat better at hiding their operation.

There are ideas floating around, however, on ways to harden blacklists agaist attacks of various sorts [sysdesign.ca]. The idea proposed in that 2004 paper would conceal the blacklist publisher, and use distributed resources to serve the list, kind of like how spammers use a fleet of zombies (except spammers steal those resources).

Spammers are a dirty bunch, they fight dirty. Maybe it's time we look more seriously at protecting the blacklists and their operators from various types of 'attacks'.

So what do you think the judge should have done in this case, given that the defendant gave the court de facto jurisdiction and then failed to make an appearance? If you fail to follow courtroom procedure and get censured for it, that's your own damn fault (in this case Spamhaus). Besides, if the judge does use e-mail, I'm sure the judge also knows what spam is.

Follow the actual story:1) Spamhaus is used in Illinois court.2) They APPEAR in court, and request that the case be moved to federal court, as IL does not have jurisdiction.3) The case IS moved to federal court.4) Spamhaus stops showing up.

They requested the involvment of the federal district court. In your example, the defendant was never involved. Here, they were. If they had argued that the U.S. has no jurisdiction in IL, they probably would have won. Instead, they argued that the federal court had j

I just glanced over the thing, and it says that at a certain point Spamhaus' laywers stopped showing up to court, so the judgement defaulted to the plaintiff. I'm pretty sure the judge didn't have a lot of leeway to do any judging at that point.

(oh yeah, great job using "mail", "judge", and "bomb" together - enjoy being an enemy combatant... ah crap! I'll see you at Gitmo...)

The judge is just following the law, and, indeed, the constitution. This has nothing to do with "freedom of speech". Spamhaus asked for a civil suit to be moved to Federal Court, and then failed to defend themselves. Wham. Default judgement.

It doesn't matter whether Spamhaus is being sued for describing Ted Kaczynski or "Spamford" Wallace as a spammer. It doesn't matter if this is Spamhaus or SPEWS. It doesn't matter if spam is a nuisance or welcomed by millions of people across the world. They failed to turn up. They're subject to a default judgement and legal sanctions to prevent them from continuing the offense.

That's what the law and constitution says is the correct response, and therefore, while it might be unpopular, this is the correct thing for the judge to do. For all the criticisms of judges "legislating from the bench", it seems that the majority of people would rather they do that than follow the law. (Witness SCOTUS's response to the Connecticut eminent-domain thing. For some reason, everyone decided it was SCOTUS at fault. The real problem was a vague phrase in the constitution, an out of control local government, and state and Federal legislatures who'd failed to impose legal limits. But everyone blamed the judges.)

The judge needs to follow the law, even when it's unpopular. The legislature needs to be told to deal with this fiasco. And Spamhaus needs to be more careful and less stupid and contradictory in their ways of dealing with courts.

(Witness SCOTUS's response to the Connecticut eminent-domain thing. For some reason, everyone decided it was SCOTUS at fault. The real problem was a vague phrase in the constitution, an out of control local government, and state and Federal legislatures who'd failed to impose legal limits. But everyone blamed the judges.)

The judge needs to follow the law, even when it's unpopular.

Reminds me of the Dread Scott v. Sandford [wikipedia.org] case. I think it was Chief Justice Taney who was a die hard abolitionist (anti-s

If Spamhaus does end up switching to a non-US registrar, I wonder how casually ICANN will be able to brush off responsibility then. It's dangerous ground, and any resulting US vs ICANN battle would set one hell of a legal precedent either way.